Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Rice seems to shift policy on prisoners

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, facing rising European anger over U.S. treatment of prisoners, said Wednesday that the United States would now interpret its responsibilities under a UN treaty as banning the cruel or inhumane treatment of prisoners anywhere, and not only on U.S. territory.

Her assertion, made in Kiev during a European tour overshadowed by reports about the CIA's use of secret prison sites in Europe, led to some confusion in Washington, possibly reflecting tension among the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House on how narrowly to define the tools available to interrogators in dealing with important terror suspects.

Rice's comments, however, appeared to give the matter a clear and broad interpretation.

Referring to the UN Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified in 1994, she said that "as a matter of U.S. policy, the United States' obligations under the CAT, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment - those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States."

Such treatment would include techniques like one known as waterboarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a plank and dunked into water to create a sense of being drowned.

Rights groups say such methods have been used at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.

Confusion about Rice's intent followed when U.S. officials traveling with her were quoted by news agencies as saying that her comments indicated a policy shift, as they appeared to do.

The White House has opposed an effort led by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to bar cruel or inhumane treatment of prisoners, at home or abroad, including by the CIA. The national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has met with McCain at least four times, most recently on Tuesday, to seek some compromise.

But when Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, was asked whether Rice had stated a new approach on the treatment of detainees abroad, he said, "It's existing policy."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said during his confirmation hearings that before the U.S. Senate ratified the torture convention, it had added a reservation that the document's reference to cruel and inhumane or degrading treatment referred only to such treatment as is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. Because the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not apply abroad, the administration maintained, techniques short of outright torture could legally be employed abroad.

David Luban, a Georgetown University law professor now visiting at Stanford University, said the Justice Department subsequently had confirmed Gonzales's interpretation.

"This looks like it's different," he said, "and I think if Rice meant what she said, that's a big change."

Luban cautioned, however, that only U.S. personnel were covered, so that interrogations by foreign police or security personnel, possibly even foreign contractors, might not be covered. And the phrase "as a matter of policy," which Rice used, has sometimes been employed by the administration to indicate that it plans to pursue a particular course but sees no legal obligation to do so, Luban said.

An aide to Rice, quoted by Agence France-Presse in Kiev, said that her remarks marked "a clarification of policy, not a shift of policy."

That language might be consistent with a change in the way the administration plans to interpret the convention.

Rice's tour of Europe, which takes her to Brussels next, was intended to improve trans-Atlantic relations. But it has been devoted in public to efforts to defuse the widespread criticism of reports that the CIA secretly transferred prisoners across Europe and harshly treated some of them at bases in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

It was unclear whether her comments Wednesday might allay some of the concerns.

Foreign Minister Ben Bot of the Netherlands said this week that Rice had yet to provide satisfactory explanations.

He predicted a "lively discussion" during her meeting Thursday with foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

If a shift in the U.S. approach on torture is confirmed, it would appear to vindicate the efforts of McCain, who as a young naval aviator was held for five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, where he was beaten.

His efforts to extend the ban on cruel and inhumane treatment have been resisted by Vice President Dick Cheney, and the administration has insisted that in a fight against a dangerous terrorist foe, it was crucial not to limit interrogators too much.

But Defense Department officials have said that military personnel are forbidden to use inhumane treatment wherever they are.

President George W. Bush said Tuesday: "We do not render to countries that torture. That has been our policy, and that policy will remain the same."

But McClellan, pressed repeatedly by reporters, would not say whether the United States took steps to ensure that countries to which the United States transfers prisoners lived up to promises not to use torture.